This chapter covers everything you need to know about communicating online with Mac OS X Tiger, from searching the Internet with Sherlock and sending email to videoconferencing with iChat AV. The Internet applications provided with Tiger can get anyone up and running online in a matter of minutes.

The Mac OS has long been the leader in network connectivity
among desktop operating systems. The Macintosh was
using MacTCP and Open Transport while Windows 3.1
struggled to get online using third-party TCP stacks
and DOS-based network card drivers. Although the
playing field has mostly leveled, it's little
surprise that Tiger includes a wide variety of Internet-related
tools. Users who are interested in getting online,
finding old friends, chatting with others, sending
email, and surfing the Internet will be happy to
find many applications to get them online in a matter
of minutes.

This chapter covers the applications that work specifically
with the Internet to gather information, send and
receive messages, and make your online life easier:

Safari (path: /Applications/Safari)Apple's
web and RSS/Atom browser based on open source
technologies.

Sherlock (path: /Applications/Sherlock)Sherlock
performs multiple search engine queries on popular
e-commerce, news, and entertainment sites and
returns results without the need for a web browser.

.MacApple's pay-for Internet service
for bringing Tiger with you, wherever you might
be.

As with the previous chapters, the applications
discussed here are presented with basic use information,
followed by configuration and menu options. The goal
is to provide information for beginners as well as
useful reference for advanced users.

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The assumption is that you already
have a working network connection configured at
installation or in your previous version of Mac
OS X. For information on setting up an Internet
connection, see Chapter 7, "Configuring Network
Connectivity."

Browsing the Web: Safari

Many people purchase computers just to access information over the Internet.
The iMac, in fact, was introduced as the "Internet" Mac. Unfortunately,
Apple’s "Internet Experience" has been tied to Internet Explorer
for the last few years. Although a capable browser, IE was not fast,
lacked many features of other browsers, and, let’s face it, was a
Microsoft product.

With Tiger, Apple has official phased out Internet Explorer in favor of
Safari—the modern and fast browser for Tiger. Safari is based on
the khtml engine—part of the popular KDE (usually associated with
Linux) project. Safari provides excellent web browsing features including pop-up
blocking, complete bookmark management, and RSS/Atom syndication support.

Understanding the Basic Browsing Controls

Figure
3.1 shows the Safari interface, with all available interface options
on (this is not the default state). Most interface elements are turned
on and off directly from the View menu or by choosing Customize Address Bar from
the View menu—with the exception of Tabs, a popular feature that allows
multiple web pages to be viewed in single window. If you’ve used a web
browser before, you might want to skip this section because it will likely be
review. We’ve had many readers ask for a more tutorial approach for
novices, however, so the information is included for their benefit.

Address Bar

The top row of controls in the Safari window is the address bar. It contains
the controls you use to navigate websites.

The Back and Forward buttons work together. Use the Back button to return
to the web page you viewed previously. After you’ve gone back, you can use
the Forward button to move ahead to where you were. If you haven’t gone
back through any pages you’ve already viewed, the Forward button is grayed
out to show that it is not an active option at the current time.

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Clicking and holding on a forward or backward arrow shows a list of pages
that you’ve visited either in front of (since) or behind (before) your
current page.

Figure
3.1 Apple’s Safari web browser with a full set of interface
options.

The Home button returns you to the page set as your default startup page.
Think of it as a shortcut for connecting to the site you visit most
frequently.

NOTE

To change the page that comes up automatically when Safari is launched, use
the General pane of the Application preferences.

The Autofill button attempts to fill in form information based on your
Address Book entries and forms that you’ve completed previously in
Safari.

The Text Size button allows you to easily increase or decrease the font
size in the current page.

The Stop/Reload button changes depending on whether the current page
identified in the address field has been loaded, or is loading. If a page has
been loaded, you see the Reload button, which allows you to refresh the page.
The Stop button appears as a page is loading to allow you to stop retrieving the
current page.

Clicking the Add Bookmark button, which looks like a +, adds the current
page to your bookmark list so that you can easily visit it again without writing
down the address. We’ll discuss Bookmarks more later in this
section.

The Print button, as expected, prints the contents of the current
page.

The Address field is where you provide the URL of the site you want to
browse. Safari also uses the address field as a status bar to indicate how much
of a page has loaded. As a page is read into Safari, a blue-shaded bar moves
from left to right across the address field as information is received.

The Google Search field allows you to type a word or phrase of interest
and search the Google search engine for relevant sites. The results listing
appears in your browser window. This is just a shortcut for visiting
http://www.google.com/.

The Bug button was included to allow people to report any problems they
experience in viewing pages. If a page fails to load in Safari, clicking this
button allows you to submit an error report to Apple.

Bookmarks Bar

The Bookmarks bar holds shortcuts to websites and news feeds that you want to
keep close at hand—think of it as a Dock for bookmarks.

You can add sites to the Bookmarks bar by dragging the icon in front of the
URL in the address field into the Bookmarks bar. A dialog appears, allowing you
to enter a more intelligible name than eBay item #442231. Remove
Bookmarks bar shortcuts by Command-dragging (or Click, Hold, and Drag) them
outside the Safari window. If you drag within the Bookmarks bar area, you can
rearrange them.

As the Bookmarks bar grows beyond the size of the Safari window (trust me, it
will) or the window is resized so that your existing bookmarks don’t fit,
Safari adds the >> icon to the end of the Bookmarks bar (just like the
Finder and other applications). Clicking and holding on this icon displays the
hidden shortcuts in a list.

A special permanent and nonmovable shortcut called Show All Bookmarks within
the Bookmarks bar resembles a book. This icon opens the Bookmark Manager, which
provides extensive control over your Safari bookmarks.

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In some of the Apple-supplied default Bookmarks bar shortcuts you might
notice entries with a down arrow after their name. These are called collections
and can only be added to the Bookmarks bar through the Bookmarks Library. You
can add Bookmarks to a collection on the bar, however, by dragging the bookmark
to the collection.

Tab Bar

Tabs are an option in Safari that allows you to have several web pages open
at one time without all the clutter of extra browser windows. After a page has
been loaded into a tab, it can be switched to by clicking the appropriate tab in
the bar—just as you use tabs to navigate between different screens in a
popular applications.

Tabs have become a popular feature largely through the development of the
Mozilla and Opera browsers. Safari borrows a page from both of these popular
alternative browser platforms. Tabs must be activated through the Tabs pane of
the application preferences.

Status Bar

The status bar, located at the bottom of the Safari window, displays
information about a page as it loads—whether it has contacted the remote
host, how many elements (such as images) of the page have been retrieved, and so
on.

The status bar also provides information about hyperlinked elements on a page
as you move your mouse cursor across them. For example, if you run your mouse
across a text link or a linked image, the address of the link appears.

Browsing the Web in Safari

To visit a website for which you know the address, type the address in the
address field in the Address bar and press the Return key on your keyboard. You
see a blue-shaded bar move across the address field as the page loads and, if
you’ve chosen to view the Status Bar, a countdown of the page elements
that are loading.

NOTE

Web pages aren’t a single object. Typically, they are composed of a
page file and separate image files. (In some cases, there might be additional
supporting files containing page content or formatting information as well.) The
countdown in the status bar as a page loads tells you just how many files it
requires!

When a page has loaded, you can click text links or linked images or buttons
to move to other pages. To cycle through form and navigation elements from the
keyboard press Option-Tab.

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Websites don’t always work. If you try to visit a site and receive a
Server Not Found message, the problem is not likely to be Safari. Such a message
occurs when there are technical difficulties for the computer hosting the
website or when a site is no longer available. Safari provides a "help"
button that you can click to help diagnose problems.

Beyond that, your best option is to double-check the address you’ve
entered. If the address is correct, you might need to wait before trying the
site again, in case there’s some kind of temporary site outage. If the
site doesn’t return, you might want to try a Google search on the name of
the site to see whether a cached version of the content is still available.

If you’re looking for a site that you know was available at
some time but appears to have vanished off the face of the earth, you
might want to try the WayBack Machine at
http://www.archive.org
to retrieve an archived copy.

Using Address Autocompletion

If you begin to type in an address you’ve visited recently, Safari
tries to autocomplete it. A drop-down menu of addresses for pages you’ve
been to that match what you’ve typed so far appears; Safari’s best
guess of which address you’re typing is highlighted. If the page you want
to view is listed in the drop-down menu, use your arrow keys or mouse cursor to
select it. If it isn’t listed, continue to type the rest of the
address.

Completing Forms with AutoFill

As you enter data in forms within Safari, you’re creating a database
that can be used to automatically fill in the contents of similar forms,
hopefully saving you some typing.

By default, Safari completes a form if it is recognized. To control Form
AutoFill for unknown forms, enable the AutoFill button in the address bar.
Clicking the AutoFill button (Shift-Command-A) forces Safari to fill in a form
to the best of its ability. You’ll also notice that much like address
autocompletion, Safari attempts to fill in individual form fields as you
type.

If you resubmit a form that Safari has already stored, Safari might prompt
you whether to keep the old values or replace them with the new entries—or
do nothing at all.

To control where Safari pulls the data for Form AutoFill, open the
application preferences and click the AutoFill icon to open the AutoFill
preferences pane, shown in Figure
3.2.

There are three sources for AutoFill data: Address Book (addresses, phone
numbers, and such), usernames and passwords (names and passwords you’ve
used to log in to websites), and other forms (any form you’ve filled in on
a website).

Beside each of these options is an Edit button. Clicking Edit opens a window
to display what username and passwords have been stored and what web domains
have forms saved (or, in the case of the Address Book, it opens the Address
Book). You can select elements in these lists and remove them if they contain
elements that you’d rather not use for AutoFill or that contain inaccurate
data.

Returning to Pages with SnapBack

As you use Safari, you might notice an icon displaying a return arrow in an
orange circle at the far-right side of the address field and Google field. Apple
has dubbed this the SnapBack button. It appears in any page you navigate to
through links within other web pages. If clicked (or Option-Command-P is
pressed), the SnapBack button takes you back to the last address you physically
typed in the address field.

You can also manually set a page to be the one to which Snap-Back returns.
Choose History, Mark Page for SnapBack from the menu (Option-Command-K). This is
a convenient way to mark a specific page while you continue to following
links.

NOTE

Google searches executed using the Google field in Safari automatically
enable SnapBack. Just click the Snap-Back icon at the right end of the Google
field or press (Option-Command-S)

Using the Browsing History

Although the SnapBack feature is great for a single browsing session, it
can’t take you back to where you were earlier in the day, yesterday, or
last week. To do this, you’ll want to use the History menu.

As you browse, Safari keeps track of where you’ve been. The History
menu displays a list of addresses you’ve visited in the current session,
along with submenus for pages visited in the past week. To clear your history
(you aren’t ashamed of where you’ve been browsing, are you?) choose
History, Clear History.

Using Tabbed Browsing

Tabs allow you to have several web pages open at one time without the clutter
of extra browser windows.

If you want to use tabs, open the Safari application preferences and then
choose the Tabs pane (shown in Figure
3.3). Check the box for Enable Tabbed
Browsing. You can also choose whether tabs containing freshly loaded pages are
automatically selected (brought to the front) or whether they wait for you to
click them. Finally, you can choose whether to show the Tab bar even when only
one tab exists.

Figure 3.3 The Tabs
preferences pane contains a few options as well as a list of keyboard
shortcuts.

Tabs are easy to use. When you want one, choose File, New Tab from the menu
(Command-T). You then see a row of boxlike buttons, or tabs just below
the Address bar. Each Tab is labeled with the name of the web page it contains,
as shown in Figure
3.4, so you can easily click between them. If you want to
close a tab, click the close icon on its far-left side.

CAUTION

If tabbed browsing isn’t enabled in the Safari preferences, you will
not see the option to open a tab under the File menu!

Figure 3.4 A row of
tabs—each representing a web page ready for viewing.

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If you want to open a link in a new tab, hold down the Command key while
clicking the link.

A unique feature of Apple’s tab implementation is the ability to open
any bookmark collection in tabs—all at once. When tabs are active, an
extra option, Open in Tabs, appears within the submenu of any collection shown
in the Bookmark menu. Choosing this loads all the pages in the collection in
your current window—one in each tab. We’ll look at how to create
collections with the Bookmarks Library shortly.

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If you want links clicked in external applications (such as Mail) to
automatically open in a new tab, use the General application preferences pane to
choose Open Links from Applications in a new tab in the Current Window. You will
not lose the page you were currently viewing.

Downloading Files

In addition to viewing web pages with Safari, you can also use it to download
files linked from web pages.

NOTE

Safari only handles http protocol downloads. FTP downloads are
handed off to the Finder. So, if you click an FTP link and Safari appears to do
nothing, check the Finder.

When you click a link for a downloadable document, Safari automatically opens
a Downloads window. Depending on your preference settings, this window might
list other files you’ve downloaded as well as show status of the current
download. You can clear the download list by clicking the Clear button.

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If Safari does not recognize the document as something to download and
instead starts to display it on the screen, you can force a link to download by
holding down Option when clicking it.

Incidentally, this is not usually a failing of Safari, but a mistake in the
MIME-type mapping of the remote server.

By default, Safari stores downloaded files on your desktop and attempts to
post-process safe files by decompressing archives and opening common file
formats such as QuickTime media. Safari will warn you if the file you are
downloading might contain something harmful and will prompt to make sure you
want to open it.

These settings can be adjusted through the General pane of the application
preferences.

Viewing PDFs Online

Starting with Tiger, Safari can now directly view PDFs linked from websites
without needing to launch an external helper like Preview. The PDF viewer, shown
in Figure
3.5 provides basic controls over the image by Control-clicking on a
PDF page. The corresponding contextual menu is also shown in Figure
3.5.

Figure 3.5 Use the
contextual menu to control the appearance of PDFs in Safari.

The menu can be used to zoom in and out of the PDF image, auto-size it, move
between pages, and switch to a side-by-side (facing) page view mode.

While it is admirable that Apple has included inline PDF viewing in Safari,
the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. For greater control, try the PDF
Browser Plugin from Shubert-it
(http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf).
This third-party plug-in has much greater control over the PDF output and
includes a toolbar for easily manipulating the PDF in the browser.

Maintaining Your Security and Privacy Online

Protecting your identity online and your browsing experience in general is
key to the Safari experience. Safari offers several options to control cookies,
pop-up windows, and more.

Limiting Web Content

To access the security features, open the Security pane of the Safari
preferences pane, shown in Figure
3.6.

Enable Plug-ins—Additional software components that allow the
display of alternative media—such as QuickTime movies, Flash animation,
and so on.

Enable Java—Enables Java applications (used by products such as
TurboTax Online) to run within your browser.

Enable JavaScript—A scripting language that enables your browser to
perform basic computing functions on a web page. Often used to verify form field
contents before submitting them back to a server or to create rollover image
effects on web pages.

Block Pop-up Windows—You know what they are. You hate them. Now
block them!

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Block Pop-up Windows can also be toggled on and off from the Safari
application menu (Command-K).

Additionally, you can set when your browser will accept cookies from
websites. Choose Always to allow any cookie to be set, Never to never
allow any cookies, or Only from Sites You Navigate To to block cookies from
advertisers and others not directly associated with the sites you are
browsing.

Clicking the Show Cookies button displays a list of cookies stored on your
machine and gives you the option to remove those you don’t want
stored.

NOTE

Cookies are a valuable tool for web developers and are used extensively on
major consumer sites. Disabling cookies completely is likely to result in sites
that can no longer successfully be navigated.

It’s important to note that much of the "controversy"
surrounding cookies is purely hype. Cookies are sent to your browser by a remote
site. They cannot be retrieved by any arbitrary website. In fact, cookies are
not retrieved at all; they are sent voluntarily by the Safari browser on
returning to a site that stored a cookie.

Finally, if you want to be prompted before sending information over the
Internet in an insecure manner, click the Ask Before Sending a Non-Secure Form
to a Secure Website check box.

Resetting the Safari Cache and Configuration

As you browse, Safari automatically stores portions of websites so they can
be quickly accessed in the future. Unfortunately, this can leave a very
traceable track of where you’ve been online.

Safari makes it simple to dump any content that it might have cached while
browsing, or even reset it to the default configuration—including removing
bookmarks. Under the application menu, choose Safari, Empty Cache
(Option-Command-E) to remove the contents of the Safari cache. To reset Safari
to its default configuration, choose Safari, Reset Safari. This removes
everything—your tracks will be wiped clean. No one will ever know
you spend your entire workday browsing the PowerPuff Girls website.

Private Browsing

A new feature of Tiger’s Safari browser is a Private Browsing mode
activated by choosing Safari, Private Browsing from the menu. In Private
Browsing mode, sites are not added to the history, form data isn’t cached
for auto-completion, and files are automatically removed from the downloads
list. If you have a family computer and decide to shop online for holiday or
birthday gifts, using this mode will ensure that your family members
aren’t given any inadvertent clues as to what they might be receiving.

Private Browsing stays in effect until you choose it again from the Safari
menu, or you quit the browser. Since its state is not maintained between
different executions of Safari, you must remember to reactivate it if
necessary.

Parental Controls

If you would like to limit the sites that your youngster (that is, your
spouse) has access to through Safari, this is easily accomplished by opening the
Accounts System Preference Pane, selecting the user to restrict, and then
clicking the Parental Controls button.

A list of all the controllable applications will be displayed, as shown in
Figure
3.7. Be sure the check box in front of Safari is selected. For more
information on the Accounts preference pane (including managing user accounts)
see Chapter 8, "Customizing User and System Settings."

Figure 3.7 Use
parental controls to restrict what children (of any age) can view.

When parental controls are active, the user will only be allowed to access
existing bookmarks within Safari. Obviously, it is up to you to add what you
consider to be appropriate bookmarks to the account before you turn your kids
loose.

To do this, you will need to log in to the user’s account, start
Safari, and then use either the bookmark manager to directly add new bookmarks
(discussed shortly), or attempt to visit the websites that the account should be
able to access. In either case, you will be prompted for an administrator
username and password before the sites can be added or viewed. After the
bookmarks have been made, the user will be able to visit those sites without
restrictions.

Reading News (RSS/Atom) Feeds in Safari

At the advent of the Internet (before we had a chance of finding things with
Google), there was much talk of eventually having intelligent agents scouring
the Internet to retrieve news stories and other information automatically for
our perusal. The problem with this vision is that web pages are not required to
follow any standards for information organization. Trying to consistently
determine what is news through pattern matching or other automated approaches is
virtually impossible.

Enter the feed.

Over the past few years, the popularity of XML (extensible Markup Language)
has resulted in the creation of information exchange standards. Sites that
previously only presented information visually are now capable of making that
information available in a way that other programs can interpret and work with.
Two popular formats for syndicating news and other timely information are RSS
(Really Simple Summary/Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary/RDF Site
Summary—take your pick) and Atom. With very little work, a site can
publish a feed in one of these formats that can be published by other sites, or
aggregated by desktop applications—in this case, Safari.

So, what does this all mean to you? In short, Safari’s ability to work
with RSS and Atom feeds means that you can subscribe to hundreds of
potential news and information feeds that will delivery summaries of the latest
information to you—rather than you having to go get it. Safari lets you
combine feeds from any number of sources simultaneously, limit the news
displayed based on keywords, or even choose how much of the summary you see and
what range of dates is displayed.

Viewing a News Feed

To view a feed, first you must know where it is. In some cases this might be
a URL which you enter into Safari using the syntax
feed://<feed location> (for example,
feed://http://www.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss).
In other cases, it will be a link you click on from a feed portal such as
http://www.syndic8.com
or
http://www.feedster.com.
In still others, Safari will automatically recognize that a website offers a
feed and will add an RSS graphic to the end of the Address field, as shown in
Figure
3.8. Clicking the RSS graphic will open the feed associated with the
site.

Figure 3.8 In some
cases, Safari will automatically identify feeds by placing a graphic in the
Address Field.

Whatever your means of arriving at a feed, the resulting view should be the
same. Figure
3.9 demonstrates Safari viewing an RSS feed. Because the purpose of
feeds is to present content, not promote a visual style, all feeds are displayed
using the same style.

Each news or information article summary is listed along with a link that
will open the article itself. The right column of the page provides simple
search and sorting features. You can also use the Article Length slider to limit
the size of the article summaries, if desired.

Figure
3.9 News feeds are displayed in the same style, regardless of where
they are from.

Feeds can been bookmarked like any other URL. Use the + (Add Bookmark) button
in the toolbar, the Add Bookmark link in the lower right corner of the feed
view, or drag it to the bookmark bar. Feeds that are added to the bookmark bar
will automatically add a number in parenthesis after their entry—this
represents the number of new stories on the site since the feed was last
viewed.

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RSS feeds can be viewed in the new RSS Visualizer Tiger screensaver. This
screensaver will render feed headlines in a swirling 3D view. Any bookmarked RSS
feeds can be used as the source material.

Use the Desktop and Screen Saver system preference pane to activate the RSS
Visualizer.

Aggregating Multiple Feeds

The true power of feeds becomes apparent when you start to view multiple
feeds together. Instead of needing to visit ten different sites for your Apple
news, all you need is to simultaneously all the feeds for the sites, and all the
news you want is presented on the same page together—sortable and
searchable as if it were coming from a single location.

To open multiple RSS/Atom feeds, you must build them into collections within
the bookmark management interface. Apple includes several prebuilt feed
collections already in your browser bookmark bar. The News and Apple selections
contain multiple RSS feeds ready for your use.

For example, to aggregate all the news feeds into a single page click and
hold on the News element in the bookmark bar. When the pop-up menu appears,
choose View All RSS Articles, as shown in Figure
3.10.

Figure
3.10 Use a collection and the View All RSS Articles option to
aggregate multiple feeds.

Obviously, the power of having the latest news whenever you want without
needing to open multiple websites is great, but you can take it even further.
Using the search and sorting functions on the right side of the viewing area,
you can customize the news display. What is truly unique, however, is that after
you’ve customized the display for exactly what you’re
interested in, you can then bookmark your feed view. This bookmark will
open the feeds with the search criteria you specified—allowing you to
create your own instant news pages tailored to your personal interests.

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Command-Clicking a bookmark bar collection will open all the RSS feeds
and any URLs within that collection.

Changing Feed Settings

The RSS pane of the Safari preferences provides additional controls over how
feeds are handled in Tiger. The settings are shown in Figure
3.11.

If you prefer to let a third-party utility such as NetNewsWire
(http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
handle your feeds, use the default RSS Reader setting to choose the default
application for opening feed:// URLs.

The other available settings control how articles and updates are handled in
Safari. Use the Automatically Update Articles check boxes to choose whether
Safari will check for new articles and display the unread count in the Bookmarks
bar and/or menu. You can also choose the frequency at which updates are
retrieved, a color to highlight new articles, and when existing articles should
be removed.

Figure
3.11
The Safari Feed settings are used to conFigure the default RSS reader
for your system amongst other things.

Bookmark Management

Earlier, you learned to drag a web or feed address from the address field
into the Bookmarks bar to quickly store it for later reference. As useful as
that feature is, there’s limited space for all the pages you want to keep.
However, there is plenty of room in the Bookmarks window, shown in Figure
3.12,
which you can open by clicking the Show All Bookmarks button at the far left of
the Bookmarks bar.

Figure
3.12 A special window to view and organize lists of your favorite
websites. (When opened, it displays the last collection you visited.)

Understanding Collections

The Bookmarks Library offers a simple view of your URLs. Along the left side
of the window is a list of collections—these are categories that you
define (except for a few built-in collections) to help better organize
bookmarks. There are five special categories, and the rest are entirely up to
you:

Bookmarks Bar—Bookmarks stored in the Bookmarks bar.

Bookmarks Menu—Bookmarks stored in the Bookmarks menu.

Address Book—URLs found within your Address Book entries.

Bonjour—Websites located on your local network that are advertised
via Bonjour. (See Chapter 23, "Creating a Web Server," for information
about advertising websites via Bonjour.)

History—A list of websites that you’ve visited over the past
week. These are also accessible through the History menu.

All RSS Feeds—All the RSS feeds that have been
bookmarked—regardless of the collection they are directly stored
in.

To view the contents of a collection, select it in the left-hand collection
list. The content area to the right of the collections refreshes to display the
bookmarks of sites stored in that collection.

Working with Bookmarks and Collections

Drag URLs in the Bookmark listing up or down to change their ordering (this
makes a difference if you display the collections in the Bookmarks menu, which
we’ll discuss shortly) or drag them to one of the folders in the
collection listing to add them to a collection.

To add a new bookmark, drag its icon from the address field to the Bookmark
listing (just as you did to add to the Bookmarks bar). To delete a bookmark,
drag it to the trash or select it and press Delete. If you want to edit a
bookmark name or URL, Control-click on the entry and choose Edit Name or Edit
Address. Double-clicking on the fields opens the URL; it does not allow you to
edit the field values, as you might expect.

To add new collections, click the + button below the collection list in the
Bookmark Manager. A new untitled folder icon appears. Type a name for the new
collection, or double-click its label at any time to edit it. Like bookmarks,
collections can be rearranged by dragging within the list or deleted by dragging
to the trash or selecting and pressing the Delete button

NOTE

If you had another web browser, such as Internet Explorer, on your computer
at the time that Safari was installed, Safari might have created a folder of the
bookmarks saved for its use.

You can add folders to a collection (think of it as a collection within a
collection) by using the + button under the Bookmark listing. This adds a new
folder to the Bookmark list (not the collection list). Drag bookmark entries
into these folders to further refine your collection.

Both Collection folders and subfolders can be dragged from the Bookmarks
Library into the Bookmarks bar to add a drop-down collection menu to the
Bookmarks bar.

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When adding folders of bookmarks to the Bookmarks bar collection, you are
also given an extra item called Open in Tabs if Tabbed Browsing is active. This
will open all the bookmarks in the collection or folder within tabs
simultaneously. If RSS feeds are also bookmarked in the folder, a second entry,
View All RSS Feeds, will be present. Choosing this option will display an
aggregation of all the feeds within that folder.

NOTE

Control-clicking on a bookmark in the library provides an option for opening
that bookmark in a tab. Control-clicking on a subfolder within a collection
shows an option for opening all bookmarks in that subfolder within
tabs.

Adding Bookmarks with the Add Bookmark Button

Although the Bookmarks Library is great for arranging your URL shortcuts,
opening it each time you want to add a site isn’t necessarily efficient.
Thankfully, Safari provides a quick solution. Clicking the Add Bookmark button
in the address bar when you are viewing a page you want to add displays a
dialog, shown in Figure
3.13, where you can name your bookmark and select a
collection in which to store it.

Bookmark Display and .Mac Synchronization Options

Safari gives you several options on how you access bookmark collections.
Obviously, you can always open the Bookmark Manager and see everything.
Likewise, the Bookmarks Bar and Bookmark Menu collections are easy to find.
However, it would be convenient if you could access all your
collections through a single menu?

Furthermore, it would be great to access all your bookmarks on all
of your machines, or even over the World Wide Web. If you’ve got .Mac
(discussed later in this chapter), you can!

To control what bookmarks are displayed, open the Bookmarks pane of the
application preferences pane, shown in Figure
3.14.

Here you can choose whether the Bookmarks bar should display Address Book
URLs and Bonjour entries (as drop-down collections) and, likewise, which of
these entries should be shown in the Bookmark menu.

You can also click the Synchronize Bookmarks with Other Computers Using .Mac
check box to create a central .Mac library of bookmarks that all your computers
can use and an online Bookmark Manager that enables you to view your
bookmarks from anywhere. Clicking the Configure button launches the .Mac System
Preference panel, which controls the .Mac bookmark synchronization.

Additional Safari Preferences

Although we’ve already covered the Bookmarks, Tabs, AutoFill, RSS, and
Security application preferences within the discussion of Safari, there are
several more esoteric settings that you might want to change to suit your
browsing needs. Let’s take a look at the remaining panes: General,
Appearance, and Advanced.

General

Options under the General pane, shown in Figure
3.15, include settings
related to how a Safari window is opened and how pages and files are
accessed.

Figure
3.15 Choose your default web browser and default home page in the
General preferences pane.

The first option is the choice of your default web browser (the web browser
that automatically launches whenever you click a link received in email or
through another program). The drop-down menu lists any application recognized as
a web browser by your system.

You also have the option of choosing whether new windows that open come up
with a specific home page that you’ve chosen, as an empty page, with any
page that’s currently open, or in Bookmarks mode.

The next three options pertain to downloading files. You have the option to
save downloaded files to the desktop or to choose another location using the
standard file browser. You can also decide how items will be removed from your
download list: manually, when Safari quits, or upon successful download. If you
like to keep a record of what you’ve downloaded, set it at Manual; if you
prefer a clean slate, choose one of the other options.

The third download-related preference is a check box to Open "Safe"
Files After Downloading. Safe files, by Safari’s definition, are files
unlikely to cause harm to your system, including media files, such as images and
sounds, PDF or text files, and disk images. If this option is checked, any safe
files are processed automatically when they are downloaded; otherwise, you need
to double-click downloaded files to launch or to uncompress them.

The final setting relates back to how Safari reacts to links you open from
other applications. Decide whether to open links in a new window or in the
current window. When using tabs, opening a link in the current window creates a
new tab; it doesn’t replace the contents of the existing tab.

Appearance

The Appearance pane, shown in Figure
3.16, contains the web page display
settings over which the viewer can have some input. You can choose any font on
the system to be used on web pages where another font is not specified. You can
also choose a fixed-width font, a font for which all letters take up
the same width in a line of text, to be used when the specified font needs to
align in a specific way.

You can also decide whether to load images in a web page, in cases where
bandwidth is an issue, you might want to turn this off.

Finally, you can set a default character encoding, which tells your browser
how to interpret characters in a web page. For example, if you regularly read
Japanese websites, you would only be able to see the correct characters if your
character encoding and the web page used the same setting.

Advanced

The Advanced preferences pane allows you to set the smallest size font that
will be displayed in Safari, or, for more customization—your own Style
Sheet (Cascading Style Sheet or CSS).

Style sheets are specially formatted description of how text on a page should
be displayed. With a carefully written style sheet, for example, you could have
text in a web page that is coded as a heading appear in extremely large type or
change its color, or you could reset the background of a page to another color
to increase or reduce contrast. (Although this feature can be useful, writing
style sheets is outside the scope of this book. You might want to visit
http://www.blooberry.com/
for reference to the style sheet syntax.)

In addition, if you need to set a Proxy server for your web connection, click
the Change Settings button. This launches the System Preferences Network pane,
which is where all proxy settings are configured.

Finally, to aid keyboard navigation of a page, you can enable the ability to
use Tab to cycle through and highlight each element on a web page. By default.
Option-Tab performs this action.